Foreign friends should come to China to appreciate Chinese art objects, yet too often we end up going overseas to see them in foreign museums. Our national treasures should not be flowing beyond our borders. They are ours, part of our roots.
—Spokesman, China Poly Group Corporation, Beijing1
Dunhuang is a small town in a poor agricultural area of northwest China. It was once a famous oasis, the westernmost outpost of China under the Han dynasty and the point of embarkation on the dangerous trek across the Taklimakan Desert along the Silk Road heading west. Just outside Dunhuang to the north is the famous Jade Gate, a stone fortress built during the second century B.C. as part of the Han dynasty’s Great Wall fortification system. A few miles to the southeast are the famous Mogao caves, Buddhist frescoed cave temples carved into a cliff face above a small river in an otherwise dry, desert valley. They were first dug by wandering monks around A.D. 366 and last dug during the Yuan dynasty in the mid-fourteenth century. Their wall paintings and sculptures range in date from the Northern Liang dynasty (sixth century A.D.) to the Ming dynasty one thousand years later.
It was here that the Hungarian archaeologist and explorer Aurel Stein came in 1907, exploring and seeking to acquire antiquities on behalf of the British Museum and the British Government of India. He had been attracted to the Mogao caves by word of their extraordinary wall paintings. While there he learned of a cache of rare, early Buddhist manuscripts and paintings discovered in one of the caves by their caretaker, the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu. After studying and documenting them, Stein negotiated a purchase of some 7,000 complete manuscripts, 6,000 fragments, and several cases of paintings, embroideries, and other artifacts, which he sent on to London and New Delhi (while negotiating their purchase, he left for two months and discovered the remains of the Jade Gate).2 A year later the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot arrived at the caves and studied an estimated 15,000 additional manuscripts over a three-week period. Of these, he purchased a few thousand, which he shipped back to the Musée Guimet and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.3 Additional materials were removed by others over the next few years and are in museums and libraries in China, Japan, the United States, and elsewhere. Together, the finds from the Mogao caves comprise a rich library of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and Khotanese manuscripts, ancient Buddhist sutras, and secular records, including medical records and accounts of grain and clothing from the military magazine at the Jade Gate, and silk paintings and textiles that document the overlapping religious and commercial cultures of the Silk Road.4
Langdon Warner, the Harvard professor of Chinese art, traveled to Dunhuang in 1924 on an expedition precisely to retrieve for Harvard an example of the art from the Mogao caves. Warner, who would become famous and celebrated two decades later for discouraging the U.S. military from destroying the Japanese cities of Nara and Kyoto, was sent to China by the director of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum on the First Fogg Expedition to China as part of Harvard’s early commitment to the study of Chinese art, history, and language. Warner left Beijing for Dunhuang in August 1923 and arrived five months later, having traveled by train, camel, and pony through the Gansu corridor. It was a harrowing trip, filled with tales of physical exhaustion, illness, and even bandits; it was a time of terrifying political chaos in China with warlords seeking to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the Qing dynasty eleven years earlier. While at the caves, Warner negotiated for the purchase of a Tang dynasty, painted stucco sculpture of a kneeling, attendant bodhisattva from Cave 328. He would also remove, rather awkwardly, some painted wall fragments. The sculpture and the fragments are now in the collection of Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum.5
It was as director of the Harvard art museums that I first traveled to the Magao caves in the autumn of 1999. Friends and I were met there by Dr. Fan Jinshi, director of the Dunhuang Academy, a center of research and conservation at the Mogao caves, founded in 1944. Dr. Fan has been at the Academy since before the Cultural Revolution and has dedicated her working life to the greater understanding and appreciation of their importance. Since 1980, when the caves were first formally opened to tourists, she and her colleagues have also managed cultural tourism at the site.
Dr. Fan is a learned, intelligent, forceful, and charming person, diminutive in size but large in stature. She greeted us as we arrived and hosted our luncheon of local delicacies: spicy noodles, vegetables, meats of various kinds, beer, and tea. She told us of her work and devotion to the caves, and she encouraged us to see as much as we could over the next two days and provided us with guides and translators. After lunch, we began our tour. At one point, as every visitor must, we broke to see a small out building with photographic displays documenting the history of the caves, the noble work of the Daoist abbot Wang Yuanlu, and the “discovery” of the caves and their contents by Stein and Pelliot. There is also a panel on the visit to the caves by Langdon Warner. Next to Warner’s picture is a photograph of the sculpture he removed from Cave 328, now at Harvard.6
For years, both before and after my initial visit to the Mogao caves, I taught a seminar that focused on individual works of art in the Harvard art museums’ collections. The Mogao stucco sculpture was always an important part of this seminar. It is a compelling work of art in itself: the wistful elegance of the Tang aesthetic, the chalky colors of the painted stucco, the profound spirit of the depicted figure’s devotion to the Buddha all arrest the viewer and compel him or her to look further into the history and purpose of the individual work of art. The students and I read of the caves’ history, of the significance of their content for the study of Buddhist art, the history of western China, and the Silk Road. And of course we read Warner’s account of his trip to Dunhuang. We then talked about the ethics and politics of his purchasing the sculpture for the university, and of our opportunity to engage with the work first-hand in the course of our studies. I told the students of the regular letters I would get from visitors to Mogao (often erstwhile Harvard graduates) who were embarrassed and angry to see the photographic representation and description of Harvard’s role in the removal of objects from the caves. But I also told them of Dr. Fan’s courtesies and the frequent visits we would have from Chinese colleagues, none of whom demanded the return of the sculpture to Mogao. Often a student would declare it inappropriate that the work was at Harvard. What right after all did Warner have to disrupt the context of the caves for the purpose of bringing the sculpture to Harvard, regardless of the many students since then who have been inspired by the work to study more about China and its history and even to debate the issues of cultural property and its place in the modern world?
We often ended by discussing the definition of culture, especially national culture, and the benefits of seeing works of art exhibited among works of art of other cultures. What, we wondered, is a national culture in this modern age, when the geographic extent of so many cultures does not coincide with national borders, and when national borders are usually new and artificial creations designating sovereignty over the cultural artifacts of peoples no longer extant or no longer in political power? Why do the Chinese claim the Mogao caves and their contents as Chinese cultural property, when for many of the centuries since the caves’ founding, the political authority of China did not extend as far as Dunhuang and where in addition to Han Chinese culture one finds evidence of Tibetan, Uighur, and Khotanese cultures? Wasn’t Dunhuang only intermittently within China’s cultural sphere of influence over the centuries until it was annexed after a successful imperialist war prosecuted by the Manchurian emperor Qianlong, who was then in control of “Han” China? And didn’t the Chinese themselves, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, destroy much Chinese cultural property, even in the area of Dunhuang? And isn’t the contemporary Chinese government seeking to minimize the presence of Muslim cultures in the western autonomous regions to the north and northwest of Dunhuang? What after all is Chinese culture today and how does one reconcile it, as one sees it in Shanghai, with what one sees in Dunhuang, Turpan, Urumqi, or Kashgar? Does everyone in the People’s Republic of China agree with what is said to be Chinese culture? Or is it, as with national cultures everywhere, the culture of the elite and powerful as opposed to the local and powerless?
There is culture and there is national culture. The former has always been a porous, constantly evolving and dynamic human creation, the result of numerous and endless influences from generations of contact with “foreign” people. No culture of any significance has ever occurred or will ever occur in isolation. And no culture of any consequence has ever been or will ever be free of distant influences.
National culture is always a political construction. It is a fixed concept coincident with the cultural identity the nation’s ruling forces claim for themselves and the nation. Chinese culture, like American or French or British or Indian or Mexican culture, is that of the elite and ruling peoples of the nation. It is not the culture of every ethnic or linguistic group within modern China. Officially within China, there are Han Chinese and some fifty-six minority “Chinese” cultures. In the province of Yunnan, minority cultures account for the majority of the population. The People’s Republic of China, like other nations of the world, including the United States, is trying to officially include its minority cultures within the dominant cultural construct without challenging the hegemony of the majority culture. In every respect but politically, China is multicultural. Politically, China is Han Chinese. What does this mean for its cultural property laws and attitudes toward “Chinese” antiquities?
As noted earlier in chapter 1, the Chinese government’s request to the United States for import restrictions includes all manner of artistic artifacts over thousands of years until 1911, only some of which are antiquities in the conventional use of the term (most are objects made for the trade or by imperial command). I argued against the Chinese request before the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the spring of 2005.7 The Chinese request included, but was not limited to, all metal, ceramic, stone, painting and calligraphy, textiles, lacquer, bone, ivory, and horn objects from the Paleolithic period to the Qing dynasty—in other words, millennia of human artistic production within the geographic area of today’s Chinese borders.8 The request stated that the pillaging and smuggling of cultural artifacts (it did not distinguish between archaeological and cultural ones) is rampant and destructive to Chinese heritage. It notes specifically that since the mid-nineteenth century, “through invasion and other means, foreign powers have looted Chinese archaeological artifacts,” that “[f]rom the beginning of the 20th century, adventurers came into China to pillage sites and illicitly remove countless artifacts,” and that in the last ten years looting has again become a serious problem. It assumes that all of these objects were pillaged from and thus caused damage to archaeological sites, resulting in the loss of knowledge. The latter may not be the case, as such material, particularly the easily transportable items like textiles, ceramics, painting, and calligraphy, had often been made for the market and circulated in the trade since at least the Han dynasty more than 2,000 years ago. Equally, it presumed that restricting imports of such material to the United States would stop or at least significantly reduce such pillaging and smuggling. I argued that this would not be the case so long as there are markets for such material elsewhere in the world, including within the People’s Republic of China itself. And there are. The total Chinese art auction sales in 2005 inside the People’s Republic of China (excluding Hong Kong) more than doubled over the 2004 total to US$1.5 billion.9 (For scale, this is more than 25 times Christie’s and Sotheby’s combined U.S. sales of Chinese art in 2005.) Today there are more than eighty Chinese auction houses and hundreds of private dealers within the People’s Republic of China handling the same items China requested U.S. Customs to embargo.
I argued before the CPAC that the Chinese request was really an attempt to have the U.S. government help enforce China’s nationalist retentionist cultural property laws. And I sketched a history of China’s efforts to control the trade in its self-proclaimed cultural property.
As early as 1930, the government of China had laws on the books restricting access to and trade in designated Chinese cultural relics.10 The law on the Preservation of Ancient Objects, dated June 7, 1930, was passed in response to the removal of cultural artifacts from China—especially from the Silk Road, including, even specifically, from Dunhuang by Stein, Pelliott, and Warner—over the previous decades. The law forbade the export of cultural objects and the transfer of such goods to foreigners even within China. It also prohibited foreigners from engaging in any archaeological excavation in China. Soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the new government passed Provisional Measures Prohibiting the Exportation of Precious and Valuable Art Objects, Pictures, and Books and the Provisional Measures Governing the Investigation and Excavation of the Sites of Ancient Cultural Ruins and Ancient Graves and Burial Grounds (May 24, 1950). These measures governed access to and distribution of cultural property, which meant objects of revolutionary, historical, or cultural interest to the state. Other kinds of objects could be exported through designated ports, subject to inspection and sealing. Field research by foreigners was prohibited without government permission. Also in 1950, and again in 1953 and 1956, the Political Affairs Council of the central government issued various instructions concerning the protection of ancient sites, cultural buildings, and historical and revolutionary relics.11
In 1961, legislation was passed on the protection and administration of cultural heritage, including buildings, sites, and objects of historical interest which recall great events of the past, revolutionary movements or important figures, ancient sites, and “valuable works of art and applied art, regardless of the period to which they belong,” as well as “representative objects which reflect the social system, social production and the life of society in all periods.” The 1982 Cultural Relics Law uses similar terms and charges Peoples Committee at all levels with responsibility for protecting and administering cultural heritage. In addition, it declares all unearthed relics state property, prohibits their export without state authorization, and allows for their expropriation and confiscation in the case of illegal exports.
The 1982 law does allow for both state ownership and private ownership of cultural relics. Of the latter, it noted that “Ownership of . . . cultural relics handed down from generation to generation which belongs to collectives or individuals shall be protected by state laws. Owners of the cultural relics must abide by the relevant state regulations governing the protection and control of cultural relics.” This reinstatement of private cultural property ownership rights in the People’s Republic of China marked a very big change in Chinese law. In 1980, there were no art auctions in China. In 2006, almost $2 billion worth of art was sold at public auctions. The initial auctions were conducted by state-run auctioneers selling confiscated art from government warehouses. Private auctions quickly took over and now the P.R.C. auctions are all private enterprises loosely regulated by the government. And of course most of the successful Chinese bidders at the auctions are private individuals, with the result that private collections in China, including Hong Kong, are growing far more rapidly than public collections are enlarging.
The 1982 law also emphasizes the state’s duty to “protect” cultural relics by prohibiting their sale except to the state and through the state sales apparatus and requiring their verification by the state. It prohibits private sales of cultural relics between individuals and to foreigners, although it allows for their being inherited by—and presumably gifted between—P.R.C. nationals. (This has been the letter of the law, but there was little enforcement of it as sales between individuals took place openly at large antiques “hyper markets” like Guwancheng in Beijing; and such “hyper markets” have only proliferated since 1982 in various metropolitan centers.) While the law does allow for export of cultural relics with state approval, the practice as of 1994 is not to allow for reasons other than a loan to a temporary exhibition, the export of any cultural relic that dates before 1795, or the sixtieth year of the reign of the Qing Emperor, Qianlong.12
Seeking to strengthen the 1982 law, which some considered too broad and lacking in means of implementation, a Circular on Cracking Down on Activities Involving Smuggling and Illegal Excavation for Cultural Relics was issued in 1987. It reinforced the 1982 principles regarding state ownership of undiscovered relics, the prohibition on private sales, and the propriety of severe punishment for those individuals, especially state personnel, caught breaking the law. In the same year, Provisional Regulations on Administrative Penalties for Speculation and Profiteering were passed to address the reselling of cultural relics as an act of speculation and profiteering. But still the central government felt a need to strengthen policy and regulations on cultural relics. And so for a third time since 1987 it issued an administrative circular, a Notice on Further Strengthening of Cultural Relics Work, which lamented that “the present development of the work on cultural relics is far from commensurate with the history of our motherland and the progress of our modernization programme. It is also way out of line with the task of reviving the great Chinese civilization.”13 These laws were not backed by enforcement mechanisms, however, and the internal art market has continued to grow at a dramatic pace.
The current Chinese economic boom began with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform plan in 1979. Care had to be taken to preserve cultural relics from damage during construction of major public works projects. Yet the pillaging of archaeological sites continued unabated, even as the nation was taking greater pride in its past as the foundation for its modern future, wanting to be certain that more and more of its cultural property remained within China as a means of reviving “the great Chinese civilization.” Measures on the Administration of Export Verification for Cultural Relics were issued in 1989 to supplement the export provisions of the 1982 law. They increased the kinds of relics subject to verification before export. And they now included items not normally associated with cultural heritage: “All pottery, gold and silver wares, copper wares, other metal wares, jade articles, lacquerwares, glasswares, carvings of various materials, sculptures, furniture, painting and calligraphy, rubbings from stone inscriptions, books of stone rubbings, books, documentary materials, brocade, stationery, stamps, currency, appliances, utensils, handicrafts and artistic objects etc., made, produced or published by China and foreign countries before 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was established; the works of late or contemporary famous painters or calligraphers, artists and crafters of the state, after 1949; paleovertebrates and paleoanthropoids, must be subject to verification for export.”14 Clearly the government was tightening its borders and widening its net for all items it considered cultural relics. Just how such items were to be verified or graded, judged worthy of restriction or allowed to be exported, was unclear. There were no objective criteria for making such determinations, and judgments in these cases were left to the various verification units.
As the Chinese economy continued to develop—by 1992 it was the world’s fastest-growing economy, averaging 10 percent annual growth—and individual citizens and government-sanctioned industrial companies began to enjoy discretionary spending and alternative forms of capital investing (i.e., in works of art), the government began to release restrictions on the domestic market in cultural relics. This caused concern among critics of the commercial trade in such material, who in February 1992 called for greater controls on the illegal trade in domestic relics. The government responded with the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Cultural Relics, which sought to strengthen regulations over private ownership of and trade in “Precious” cultural relics, or those of the “First, Second, and Third grades.”
Chinese interest in protecting and preserving cultural relics, and cultural property generally, has increased coincident with the nation’s economic development.15 Between 1979 and 1987, China devoted RMB300 million to cultural relics protection, more than was spent in all of the first thirty years of the People’s Republic of China. The amount budgeted for 1992 was RMB120 million, an increase of RMB70 million over 1991, with even more spent in subsequent years. At the same time, much more was being spent on economic development, often resulting in the destruction of archaeological sites. The Three Gorges Dam is only the most famous incidence of this. Often described as “China’s biggest construction project since the Great Wall,” the dam is expected to produce as much electricity as eighteen nuclear power plants and to tame the notoriously dangerous Yangtze River, which through flooding has claimed more than 1 million lives over the past one hundred years. The project is expected to be completed in 2009 and flood nearly four hundred square miles of land, which some archaeologists have estimated contain as many as 1,300 important archaeological sites, including some relating to the Ba, an ancient people who settled the region over 4,000 years ago. The government has recognized this and has supported salvage archaeology in the area. But while the dam itself cost billions of dollars and was set to a relentless construction schedule, only a tiny budget and short period of time were allocated to “emergency” archaeology.
As of mid-1993, the government claims to have restored 1,000 ancient palaces, caves, buildings, and sites, and to have examined a further 350,000 sites, many of which contain several hundred tombs.16 It promises soon to open hundreds of new museums, including some dedicated to the presentation and preservation of cultural relics and ethnic minority artifacts. These initiatives are not only the result of considerable concern over the pillaging of archaeological sites and the looting of cultural relics for both domestic and foreign markets, but also the result of increasing pride in China’s cultural heritage and excitement about the potential for commercial and cultural tourism development. A 1993 news article praised advances in cultural relics training and conservation by noting that “The efforts have paid off. In 1992 forty-four historic and cultural cities earned an equivalent of RMB10.33 billion in tourism.”17
With economic development has come calls for discouraging export of cultural relics to foreign markets and buying back “for China” Chinese cultural relics “held” abroad. Among the Chinese companies most active in the domestic and international markets for Chinese relics is the Poly Group, a conglomerate with its own museum of Chinese antiquities, mostly unprovenanced and unexcavated.
The Poly Art Museum in Beijing opened in December 1999. It is an exemplary facility, with modern environmental systems, security measures, and installation design comparable to any museum anywhere in the world. And its scholarship is equally advanced. Its permanent collection catalogues are handsome and thorough: fully illustrated, with interpretive essays, full and accurate descriptions of individual objects, and line drawings and photographs of details when appropriate.18 The museum is also highly acquisitive. Early in 2000, it spent $4 million to purchase three Qing dynasty bronze heads of a monkey, ox, and tiger that had originally been part of a zodiac fountain at the Chinese Emperor’s Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) outside Beijing. The relics had been looted by British and French soldiers in the middle of the nineteenth century during a punitive expedition following the end of the second Opium War. The bronze heads eventually ended up in European collections, and when Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses announced their intention to sell the works in Hong Kong, Chinese nationalists in both Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China rose up in opposition. Even the dissident Hong Kong–based April 5 Action Group, typically fiercely critical of the Beijing government, was outraged by the intended sale.19
The P.R.C. State Bureau of Cultural Relics objected to the sale of the bronze heads for fear that they would be purchased by foreign collections and thus remain outside China. But Hong Kong officials claimed they had to honor their commercial obligations and were not bound by any P.R.C. constraints on selling antiquities. The sale went ahead and the Poly Art Museum stopped at nothing to acquire the bronzes. Ma Baoping, curator of the museum, insisted he had no choice but to pay whatever was necessary to recover the works: “If there are 12 hostages and you can only save three, would you do nothing? We must pay regardless of the cost,” he said. For him, and for many P.R.C. elite, the bronzes were seen as hostages, as rightfully belonging to the Chinese people and, as they were being put up for auction where they might be purchased by anyone from anywhere in the world, it was like they were being stolen again; or rather, having been stolen and now once again on view, it was like they were being held for ransom. Xie Da Tong, managing director of Poly Investment Holdings Ltd, which officially bought the relics for the museum, said “It is not right that somebody either looted your personal belongings or stole your personal belongings. They can keep it if there’s no international rule or policing of these kind of activities, but it’s not fair that they should come to your house [i.e., Hong Kong] and try to sell those products. This is a very bad impression on me and I think on many of the Chinese people.”20
The purchase of the bronzes was in keeping with what the New York Times described as part of the museum’s mission “to bring back Chinese treasures that have been smuggled or sold out of the country.”21 The Chairman of the Poly Group, Shan Yihe, wrote in the preface to a catalogue of selected highlights of the museum’s ancient bronzes in 2001: “Most of these pieces [the forty bronzes included in the catalogue], lost to overseas collections, have exchanged hands many times. . . . Their return not only makes us fondly recollect days of old, but is more importantly a source of great comfort.” And the “rescue of three bronze animal heads, formerly of the Summer Palace, particularly aroused the patriotic passions of Chinese sons and daughters. Regardless of the difference in their political stands and religions, they all equally praised the rescue.”22
The museum proclaims to seek only “the precious, the rare and the fine,” searching “widely in Europe, Asia, and America, enabling a large amount of cultural relics on the level of national treasures to return to their native place, putting an end to their wicked fate of wandering without proper shelter.” And its chairman goes on to declare proudly that the “Poly Art Museum greatly enhanced the movement to preserve the cultural relics of our motherland, and received wide praise from all fields.” The nationalist rhetoric is obvious: the museum’s mission is political, acquiring for China what it believes to be rightfully China’s cultural heritage. How—and how recently—the antiquities of art got on to the domestic or international market is beside the point. As the New York Times noted, the museum has spent millions of dollars, mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, “where newly discovered relics tend to appear on the market after being smuggled out of China. Some of the most stunning bronzes were almost certainly unearthed and smuggled out in just the past several years, museum officials believe.” “It’s not a very cheerful job, buying these items back from overseas,” Mr. Yu said. “But I think the Chinese people will be happy to know that at least we’re getting them back.” Mr. Yu toured the New York Times reporter through the museum and pointed out the rarest and most valuable bronze in the collection, from the Western Zhou period, 11th–8th century B.C., which he noted was probably unearthed in Shaanxi Province in the “recent past,” and which he bought from a Hong Kong dealer.23 (The Poly Group has many divisions, of which the Poly Art Museum is but one section of one division. Another section of that same division is the Beijing Poly International Auctions Co., Ltd, which claims to be among the top five auction houses in the People’s Republic of China).24
Critics of U.S. and European art museums would not approve of our purchasing unprovenanced antiquities likely to have been only recently and clandestinely unearthed and smuggled out of the source country. These critics hold that such purchases only encourage further looting and smuggling and that the only way to stop looting and smuggling is to not purchase unprovenanced antiquities. This is the basis too for the Chinese government’s request to the U.S. government to prohibit import into the United States of what it claims to be its cultural property, including antiquities. It asks the U.S. government to not permit U.S. museums to acquire what Chinese art museums can acquire, both within China and elsewhere: unprovenanced and likely looted and recently smuggled antiquities. The Chinese justification is that these are rightfully Chinese property, wherever they may now be. Buying them back for China is a patriotic act regardless of any alleged incentivizing effect such acquisitions may have on the looting of archaeological sites. And the constraints they want the rest of the world to accept—that Chinese antiquities and cultural property proposed for acquisition be accompanied by documentation proving that they were legally removed from China and not excavated or looted—do not apply.
Two years after the Poly Art Museum purchased the Yuanmingyuan bronze heads, the China Cultural Relics Recovery Fund was established.25 Chinese businesses making donations to the fund were allowed tax exemptions. The web site ChinaCulture.org described the fund as the “first and only art foundation in China that enjoys such a policy widely adopted in Europe and the United States.” The director of the fund was quoted as saying that “the rise in the price of artwork in its home country, and the forthcoming return of the country’s relics from overseas have been a natural result of the economic boom.” He was also quoted as saying that there are three ways for a country to recover cultural relics from overseas collections: “to apply international conventions, to purchase them and to get them back as donations.”26
In April 2005, ChinaCulture.org reported that the China Cultural Relics Recovery Program had announced a new project to reclaim China’s national treasures from around the world. It reported that “Artifacts returned from overseas account for more than 50% of lots at domestic auctions, and 60% of total auction deals. By January 2005, nearly 40,000 returned cultural relics had been auctioned to Chinese buyers.”27 Two months later in an article on the China Cultural Relics Recovery Program, China Daily reported a senior cultural heritage preservation expert as saying “Cultural wealth can be shared by the whole world, but not the ownership, just like the property rights on software. Ownership of lost Chinese cultural treasures should lie with the Chinese people.” In the same article it was also noted that the Wall Street Journal reported that the spring 2005 Christie’s auction of Chinese relics totaled $10 million, most of the relics being purchased by Chinese.28
In early 2006, the (UK) Guardian newspaper reported on the British Museum’s loan of more than 270 objects from its collection to the Capital Museum, Beijing. No Chinese objects were included. The director of the Capital Museum was quoted as saying that “If we exhibited these items it would imply that we recognized their ownership.” In the same article, a spokesman from the Poly Group, which was credited with spending GBP 57 million to buy Chinese art from abroad, is quoted as saying, “Foreign friends should come to China to appreciate Chinese art objects, yet too often we end up going overseas to see them in foreign museums. Our national treasures should not be flowing beyond our borders. They are ours, part of our roots.”29
The Poly Art Museum, for which the Poly Group purchased so much of its Chinese art, enjoys the closest relations with China’s elite. At its founding, it was headed by He Ping, a son-in-law of Deng Xiaoping, and one of its primary consultants is Yu Weichao, until recently head of the National Museum of Chinese History in Beijing. The Poly Group itself is well connected. Officially China Poly Group Corporation, it was, according to its Web site, founded in 1984 with “acceptance by the central government, State Department and Central Military Commission, Poly Technology Co., Ltd was built up jointly invested by Furnishment flow of the General Staff and China International Trust & Investment Corporation specializing in import and export of industrial equipments.”30 In 1992, upon “acceptance by the State Department and Central Military Commission, China Poly Group Corporation was founded on the basis of Poly Technology Co., Ltd.” A year later it was “one of those corporations specifically designated in the state plan.” In 1994, on its tenth anniversary, General Secretary Mr. Ziang Zemin acknowledged the national importance of the corporation by making the epigraph (a traditional kind of written declaration of value, like those found on important temples and monuments during Imperial times), “Solidification and Enterprising for Flourish of Poly.” Premier Li Peng made the epigraph, “Learning from those advanced for enterprising and progress.” Vice Premier Li Peng made the epigraph, “Sticking to the priority of quality and credit and keeping on enterprising for contribution to the career of foreign trade and cooperation.” Vice President of Military Commission Liu Huaqing made the epigraph, “A Hard work having brought out 110–124 achievement and making persistent for more progress.” And Minister of National Defense Chi Hoatian made the epigraph, “A Hard working and enterprising and dedication with selflessness.” And in 1999, the same year as the founding of the Poly Art Museum, the Poly Group became “one of those 180 key state-owned enterprises directly under administration of central government.”
Its Web site further notes that after twenty years of development, Poly Group has “shaped up two core businesses: defense products trading and real estate development and has cultivated and developed a cultural industry.” It lists its total assets as of 2004 as 15.5 billion yuan ($2B), and its profit that year as 538 million yuan ($70M). A year later, as a result of an announced equity participation with Credit Suisse, the Swiss financial services company described the Chinese conglomerate as having business activities in trading, real estate, culture, and the arts with total assets estimated to be more than HKD20 billion ($7.8B).31 Poly Group is no small business, and the Poly Art Museum is not without resources for buying Chinese antiquities at home or abroad.
Running throughout the various descriptions of the Poly Group cited is its relationship to the Chinese military and “defense products trading,” or arms dealing. The New York Times article pointed this out up front. Its opening paragraph reads in full: “A much-needed little antiquities museum has been created in Beijing by a most improbable source: a giant state corporation that was long notorious for its global weapons sales and was until recently a branch of the People’s Liberation Army.” The article was published in July 2006. When the Archaeological Institute of America’s popular magazine Archaeology reported on the purchase of the Yuanmingyuan bronze zodiac heads by the Poly Art Museum in 2000, it described the Poly Group simply as a “Beijing-based state owned corporation.”32 By then and by its own admission on its Web site, the Poly Group was a large industrial and commercial conglomerate with an extensive history in dealing arms.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service report of August 27, 2003 (Commentary No. 84) described the production of arms in China like this:
In order to increase funds for the military, in the 1980s the Chinese army was allowed to enter into profit-making businesses, under favourable tax and investment rules. By the mid-1990s, the so-called PLA Inc. [People’s Liberation Army] included over twenty thousand companies in everything from agribusiness to electronics to tourism to arms exports. In 1998, because of concerns about corruption and discipline, the leadership ordered the PLA to divest itself of its profit-oriented businesses in exchange for increases to the military budget. . . . But the PLA has not completely withdrawn from the economy, nor have divested firms completely severed ties with the PLA. These issues are best illustrated by the example of Poly Technologies, founded in the 1980s by the son of a PLA marshal, and currently headed by the son in law of Deng Xiaoping. Before 1998, Poly was one of the major exporters of weapons and technology from China. It had several U.S. subsidiaries involved in technology acquisition. . . . Its employees were implicated in the 1996 attempt to smuggle AK-47s into the U.S. The effects of the divestiture order on Poly are not entirely clear. Its arms-trading entities are believed to have been retained by the newly created General Armaments Division of the PLA, where they are not easily subject to civilian control. Now known as China Poly Group, the divested Poly has diversified into a broad conglomerate, active in tourism, infrastructure construction and real estate. . . . Poly is believed to have influenced defence production and procurement entities to over-supply the PLA arsenal, with Poly selling the surplus abroad at reduced prices.33
The Poly Group and its Art Museum are aggressively seeking to purchase—and the Poly International Auction Co., Ltd., is trying to sell—the very kind of material that the Chinese government is requesting the U.S. government to ban. This is clearly a case where retentionist cultural property laws are part of a nationalist cultural and political agenda. Cultural property laws are devised to serve the nationalist agenda of the state. And when antiquities are counted as cultural property—Western Zhou bronzes together with Qing dynasty bronzes—they are being used for the same purpose: to legitimize the current government by reference to an ancient Chinese culture, as if the People’s Republic of China were the rightful, indeed natural, heir to Chinese dynasties of millennia past.
But what of minority ethnic cultural property in China? How does a minority culture fit into the official P.R.C. view of what is and is not Chinese cultural property? To learn more about Chinese minority cultures, I flew northwest from Dunhuang to Urumqi, capital city of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, in the fall of 2005. I returned a year later and traveled south from Urumqi to Kashgar, a major oasis town on the western edge of the Taklimakan Desert, still within Xinjiang but not far from the borders of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgystan.
The Dunhuang airport had probably tripled in size in the four years that separated my first and second visits to the Magao caves. But it was nothing like the Urumqi International Airport, which is only one of Xinjiang’s seven major airports. (Xinjiang leads all Chinese provinces and autonomous regions in the number of airports; the Xinjiang Airline Company shipped a passenger volume of 1,340,600 passengers last year.)34 For Urumqi is the capital of China’s largest region, with a landmass of 1.66 million square kilometers, or roughly one-sixth of the entire landmass of the People’s Republic of China and three times the size of France. Its population of about 20 million is almost half Uighur, local peoples of Turkic descent and for hundreds of years Muslim by faith. The ethnic makeup of the region is a matter of concern to both local Uighurs and the central P.R.C. government.
The name Xinjiang means “new frontier” or “new territory” in Chinese, and dates only from the eighteenth century, when the Emperor Qianlong extended the Qing Empire to its greatest extent by defeating the Zunghar Mongols and controlling much of present-day Xinjiang.35 (The name was officially given the region later, only in 1884.) Xinjiang had been first inhabited thousands of years before by what appear to have been Indo-European peoples from the steppes north and east of the Black Sea. The celebrated “Loulan Beauty,” the preserved remains of a female corpse unearthed in the Tieban River delta in 1980, dates from around 4,000 years ago.36 During the second century B.C., the area was occupied by members of a confederation of Altaic-speaking tribes, called the Xiongnu, who formed an empire encompassing much of Mongolia, northwest China, and Zungharia. They were opposed by the Chinese during the Han dynasty, and ultimately divided much of the region with them. The Han dynasty fell in A.D. 221 and various tribal confederations ruled part of the region in succession for the next 350 years. Around A.D. 560, the Kök Türks rode out of Mongolia, defeated the local powers, and held control over much of the area until their defeat at the hands of the Chinese Tang, who controlled the area through military and diplomatic alliances with the Turkic peoples. The influence of the Kök Türks over the region only increased during this period, despite Tang sovereignty. Throughout much of the seventh and eighth centuries, the Tang Chinese lost control over parts of the region through rebellions in the west and control of the south by a Tibetan empire. The Tang finally retreated altogether from Xinjiang in the mid-eighth century to focus attention and resources on the An Lushan rebellion “back home,” but not before it enlisted the help of the recently arrived Uighur peoples from the north to serve as its proxy in the Xinjiang region. The Uighurs controlled much of the Xinjiang region for the next one hundred years until they were ultimately destroyed by the Kyrgyz peoples from the northwest in A.D. 840, and scattered throughout the region; the main group of Uighurs settled in what is now Urumqi and Turpan and the area in between. There, Uighur kings ruled from the nineth through the thirteenth centuries, or longer than any other power in the history of the area.
These early Uighurs were not Muslim but Mongols who embraced Manichaeanism and Buddhism and tolerated Christianity. They intermarried with Iranian and other Indo-European peoples who had made up the indigenous population of the area before the Türks arrived. It was the Karakhanid rulers, who had emerged following the Kyrgyz victory over the Uighurs in the western reaches of the area, who converted much of the western Xinjiang region to Islam by the eleventh century. The elite, primarily Buddhist, Turkic society centered in the south around Turpan became known as Uyghuristan from 932 to 1450, to distinguish it from the Muslim Türks living in the western parts of Xinjiang. The Buddhist Uighurs converted to Islam only in the fifteenth century. Thus, although the modern Uighur people take their name from the historical Uighur Empire, they take their religion from the Karakhanid Muslims. Of course, too, since the mid-eighteenth century, they have been “Chinese,” part of the People’s Republic of China since 1949, and officially the Xinjiang Uighurs Autonomous Region since 1959. (To complicate matters a bit more, the region was a satellite of the USSR from 1934 to 1941, during a period of political chaos in China, and the Eastern Turkistan Republic from 1933 to 1934 and again from 1944 to 1949, a distinctly multiethnic state.)
The Xinjiang region is and always has been a borderland. The historian Peter Perdue has written that “[t]he frontier zone was a liminal space where cultural identities merged and shifted, as peoples of different ethnic and linguistic roots interacted for common economic purposes. . . . The story of the eighteenth-century Qing empire is of an effort to seal off this ambiguous, threatening frontier experience once and for all by incorporating it within the fixed boundaries of a distinctly defined space, and by drawing lines that clearly demarcated separate cultures.” But “since Chinese efforts to demarcate the frontier never succeeded, the zone was never stabilized. It always contained transitional social groups—sinicized nomads, semi-barbarized Chinese, Tibetans, Muslims, and peasants.”37
Xinjiang is a conglomerate of different cultures—forty-seven different ethnic groups—mostly, as Perdue describes them, “separate and oriented toward their local environments.” Ever since the Qing dynasty, at least, colonizing political entities have tried to dominate the region by changing the makeup of its ethnic identity. The Qing first sent military colonists, both Manchu and Han, then exiled criminals, then resettled Han Chinese from Gansu Province looking for agricultural opportunities, and finally Muslim settlers from the south to help clear new land in and diversify the population of the north. Modern Chinese historians have described the Qing settlement policies and practices as precursors to the modern multinationality nation-state of Xinjiang. But Xinjiang’s multinationality remains of concern to the P.R.C. On the one hand, the central government in Beijing wants to promote local culture: hence the new Xinjiang Uighurs Autonomous Region Museum in Urumqi, dedicated to the preservation and presentation of local cultural relics. But it also wants to control it, knowing well the region’s legacy of independent actions and movements. It is doing so by pumping development money into the region (hence the new, expanded airport).
The number of Han Chinese as a proportion of Xinjiang’s population increased from 5 percent in 1949 to 40 percent in 1982 (it was still roughly 40 percent in 2000).38 In the 1990s, the Beijing government developed a plan to relocate hundreds of thousands of inhabitants from the Three Gorges Dam area of Sichuan to Xinjiang. Today, according to The Times of Central Asia, the majority population of Xinjiang is Chinese.39 This is a result of the Beijing government’s “great development of the west” program, often referred to as the “Go West” policy, launched in January 2000. In part it is designed to overwhelm or at least balance the dominance of the Uighurs in the area, certainly in the urban areas. The capital city of Urumqi, for example, was 76 percent Han in 1998, as opposed to the small oasis town of Turpan, which was 71 percent Uighur. But it is also a natural result of wanting to shore up the far western border of the nation with large populations of politically stable citizens enjoying the fruits of the region’s economic development. Within five years, Xinjiang is expected to become the country’s biggest producer of crude oil and natural gas, sitting on 40 percent of the nation’s proven oil reserves and 34 percent of its natural gas reserves. And it is expected to more than double its annual output of oil within a few years. It also borders on Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, energy-rich countries from which China wants to import as much oil and gas as possible. And there is talk of two east–west natural gas pipelines from Xinjiang to the southern Chinese province of Guangdong and from Xinjiang to Siberia, the latter to connect with a pipeline already between Xinjiang and Shanghai.40 (The modern hotels of Kashgar are filled with Petro-China oil workers wearing smart red uniforms and driving white, modern, imported SUVs back and forth from Kashgar to the oil wells deep in the Taklimakan Desert. The contrast between the Chinese engineers and the local Uighur population is telling in appearance and financial resources, and the two groups rarely meet; the Chinese remain hotel guests uninterested in patronizing the local markets and bazaar. Petro China attracted $1 trillion in market capitalization at its first public offering of stock in China in November 2007.)
But such economic development hasn’t solved the “Uighur Problem.” The region, episodically fiercely independent, is thought still to be a separatist threat to the central government. Beijing has denounced the “three evil forces” of separatist, terrorist, and religious extremism in Xinjiang.41 As an “autonomous region”—Xinjiang Uighurs Autonomous Region—the government must be led by Uighurs. But the Chinese Communist Party, which wields the real power in the region, is typically headed by Han Chinese (by one account, Uighurs make up only 37% of the CCP in Xinjiang).42 The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent states in Central Asia caused Beijing concern for the fate of Xinjiang. The Standing Committee of the CCP—the most powerful men in China—convened a special meeting in March 1996 to discuss the “Xinjiang question.” The official record of the meeting was a secret document obtained by Human Rights Watch in late 1997.43 The document suggested a variety of measures to curb current and potential terrorist, separatist problems in Xinjiang, including the transfer to the region of “reliable” Party cadres, the purging from the CCP of ethnic Uighur cadres who “believe in religion and refuse to change, mobilization of China’s security apparatus, and the resettlement in the area of large numbers of Han Chinese.” In the same year, the central government announced a “Strike Hard” campaign in Xinjiang, outlawing “illegal” religious activities and countering violent opposition with the imposition of long terms of imprisonment and executions (some 24 in 2000 alone).
The Chinese government has focused simultaneously on secular resistance and religious activities in the region, at times confusing the one for the other. On April 5, 1990, Uighurs were killed in clashes with Chinese police near Kashgar (in an incident known in Chinese as the Baren County Counter-Revolutionary Armed Rebellion). Five years later, in the southern oasis town of Khotan, a large number of Muslim worshippers left their mosque to block traffic. When the police tried to clear them, they revolted and hundreds were killed and even more arrested. And then in 1997, more than three hundred students were killed in Ili in conflicts with police and soldiers. Bombing incidents occurred later that year in Urumqi and in Beijing, where Uighur militants blew up a bus. Central government crackdown on Uighur violence and opposition only increased after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York. The Chinese government charged that Uighur groups had links with the Taliban in Afghanistan and were supported by radical Islamist organizations abroad.44 In August 2002, the government identified eight Uighur terrorist groups operating in Xinjiang, including the Eastern Turkish Islamic Movement and the more secular Eastern Turkistan International Movement.
A few weeks later, the U.S. State Department, China, and the United Nations announced that the Eastern Turkish Islamic Movement would be placed on the list of international terrorist organizations.45 (The state-run press referred to all of them generally as “East Turkestan terrorists.”) Antagonism to the Uighurs was not shared by all Washington politicians after the September 11 attacks; not even by all conservative Republicans. Senator Jesse Helms, for example, no friend of terrorists or enemies of the United States of any kind, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Times a month after the attacks declaring that if “the U.S. should end up receiving any kind of support from Beijing for our anti-terrorist efforts, it will almost certainly come at the price of acquiescence in China’s crackdown on the Uighurs (as well as its attempt to crush Tibet and isolate Taiwan). That would be a moral clamity, for there is no justification in lumping the Uighurs with the murderous fanatics who demonstrably mean us harm. The Uighurs are engaged in a just struggle for freedom from Beijing’s tyrannical rule.” Helms was also a major supporter of Radio Free Asia’s Uighur broadcasts, which had begun broadcasting in 1998 in a format similar to that of Voice of America. When in May 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation establishing permanent normal trade relations with China, it attached a provision increasing funding for both Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.46
The New York–based Human Rights Watch claims that the “security problem that exists in Xinjiang is being manipulated by Chinese authorities for political ends. When it is expedient—for example, when trying to attract foreign investment for the multimillion Xinjiang-Shanghai pipeline—the authorities insist that only ‘an extremely small number of elements’ are engaged in separatism, and that the situation is stable. . . . On the other hand, when it desires international support for its crackdown on Uighur challenges to Chinese authority, including peaceful activities, the government raises the specter of Islamic terrorism.”47 Many Western observers do not see a serious Islamist threat within Xinjiang but do note the existence of a Uighur opposition-in-exile, which is based in Turkey, Germany, and the United States and comprises a federation of many Turkish and European Uighur associations. Human Rights Watch reports that these and pan-Turkic movements like the East Turkestan Party and the Uighur Liberation Organization are ethno-nationalist movements, “that is, articulated along ethnic lines, not religious ones. There is no significant cooperation among Xinjiang’s different Muslim ethnic groups of Kazakhs, Mongols, Tajiks, and Uighurs.” In addition, as with most nationalist and separatist groups everywhere, Uighur nationalist groups tend to be led most often by intellectuals rather than religious leaders. And Uighur intellectuals are less inclined than most Uighurs to identify Islam as a key element in their personal identity. They see themselves as Marxists, even Kemalist republicans like the secular groups in Turkey. Nevertheless, as two scholars wrote recently, “Islam is likely to play an increasing role in the Uyghur [sic] nationalist movement in the future. The intensity of the nationalist movement will inevitably increase, for it is nourished by the single dominant and sinister reality for all Uyghurs—relentless, massive, and unceasing in-migration of Han Chinese that threatens virtually every aspect of the Uyghurs’ communal existence across Xinjiang.”48
Uighur identity is formed by the peoples’ history as frontier or border people. (Xinjiang is bordered by Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Tibet.) Their long and complicated history has weakened any sense of a unified identity. As one scholar put it, “a ‘Uyghur’ can be variously a Uyghur; a Muslim; a Turk who is part of a greater Turkic world and a speaker of a Turkic language; a resident of a specific oasis town, which has its own special local culture (e.g., Kashgar, Turpan, and Aksu); a citizen of China, however unsought this status might be.”49 For Uighurs, as for all individuals, which aspect of identity is most important at any one time depends on the issue at hand and its social context.
This is true for the Han Chinese just as much as it is for the Uighurs. And it makes one wonder when the Poly Art Museum chairman wrote that his museum’s “rescue of three bronze animal heads, formerly of the Summer palace, particularly aroused the patriotic passions of Chinese sons and daughters,” which sons and daughters he had in mind. The Han Chinese and all of the fifty-six ethnic minority peoples, the latter comprising nearly 10 percent of the Chinese population? Is it possible that all Chinese everywhere felt patriotic about the bronze heads from the zodiac fountain of the Qing Summer Palace? What could ever justify such a remark? Clearly a range of Chinese people likely felt differently about the purchase, if they knew of it at all. And the chairman must have known this was the case because he made the further point that “regardless of their differences in their political stands and religions, they all equally praised the rescue.” Differences in politics and religions exist and are often sources for difficulties, even violence. The destruction and looting of the Old Summer Palace was no doubt an offense to official Chinese confidence at the time. But did the Uighurs care then? Do they care now?
It is hard to imagine, when driving the long, straight, recently paved road from Urumqi to Turpan, that many people there cared about the Yuanmingyuan sculptures when they were looted in the 1860s or “saved” for China and the Chinese in 2000. The drive is many hours long. The “Flaming Mountains” are off to the left, great red, sandstone hills that run for 100 kilometers, empty and foreboding. To the right, from time to time, oil wells and machinery appear like large, mechanical Bactrian camels moving rhythmically across the sand in the blinding light of the desert sun. Even in October and November, it is hot during the day. The ruins of the ancient city of Jiaohe look like so many melting forms only slightly reminiscent of buildings. Jiaohe was the capital city of one of the small kingdoms in the “Western Regions” during the Han dynasty. Perched high on a terrace with rivers on either side, it gave protection to local peoples and troops from raiding bands of Xiongnu horsemen. And it did so for hundreds of years, even for the Uighurs, until the Mongols destroyed most of it and it was abandoned during the Yuan dynasty in the fourteenth century. Walking among the ruins one gets a sense of the urban plan and scale of dwellings and public spaces, but not much else. It is a lonely place now and, I suspect, despite the nearby rivers and grapes and trees, it was always so. It was more a garrison town than a city, a place where, far from the rest of the world, local peoples worked hard to live and were always subject to the threats and violence of conquering armies.
Turpan is six miles to the east. It was an important oasis town along the Silk Road. One of its earliest names, “Land of Fire,” derived from the intense, long summer temperatures. Grapes grow well here, and from grapes, raisins and wine are made. Turpan commanded the northern trade routes along the Tarim Basin. Caravans stopped here on their way from Dunhuang en route to Urumqi to the north or Kashgar to the west. It is still a market town. The markets are filled with local produce—grapes, raisins, melons, and pomegranates—and yogurt, cold rice noodles, kebabs, and delicious nan flatbreads filled with meat or plain. The markets also have stalls and stalls of modern, ikat-looking fabric, electric colors of feathered stripes flecked with golden, metallic thread, and machine-produced carpets and quilted jackets and caps. The ikat-like fabrics are like displays of exploding fireworks along the otherwise drab and dusty streets and recall the handmade, Central Asian ikats first produced and sold along the Silk Road in the eighth and ninth centuries and then sold in greater and greater numbers through the nineteenth century in Bukhara and Samarkand to the west.50
Turpan is a Muslim town today. Its Uighur residents were converted to the faith more than one thousand years ago. But for centuries before that it was a Buddhist center and was even visited by the celebrated, seventh-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang. The learned Xuanzang left Xi’an (Chang’an), the Tang capital, in A.D. 629, and headed west along the Silk Road toward Central Asia and India. He was in search of the true sources of Buddhism and wanted to meet and learn from the holy men of Magadha and the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya where the Buddha achieved enlightenment.51 He traveled through the Gansu corridor to the sands of the Taklamakan Desert and the Tarim Basin, reaching Turpan in early 630. The local king was also a devout Buddhist, and upon hearing of Xuanzang’s approach went out to greet him. The two men talked through the night. When Xuanzang rose to leave, the king refused to let him go and made him stay and preach in the oasis town for a full month. We know that Xuanzang visited the ancient city of Gaochang, southeast of Turpan and once a center of Manicheanism as well as Buddhism (German archaeologists have even discovered a Nestorian church outside the city walls). There, Xuanzang is said to have preached to three hundred people in a pavilion especially prepared for him by the king. He may also have visited Jiaohe and even walked in the “Flaming Mountains” and the Tian Shan Mountains to the Thousand Buddhist Caves in Bezelik, thirty-five miles northeast of Turpan.
The caves at Bezelik are lesser versions of those at Mogao. Xuanzang had chosen not to visit the Mogao caves on his way to Turpan. But he would visit them sixteen years later on his return. A mural painting there in Cave 103 commemorates his visit and depicts Xuanzang crossing the Pamirs accompanied by a white elephant, which he received as a gift from an Indian king.52 When he finally returned to Chang’an, Xuanzang was received in triumph. He was carrying crates and crates of cultural relics: “150 pellets of the Buddha’s flesh and a box of his bone relics,” and seven statues of the Buddha, some as tall as four feet, some made of wood, others of silver; all from India. He also brought 657 books bound in 520 cases. These were classified as “224 Mahayanist sutras and treatises; writings from a number of Hinayanist sects that were for the most part unknown, and no less than 36 general works of logic and 13 works on grammar.”53 His ambition was to translate as many of these scriptures as possible. But the emperor required that he first write a Record of the Western Regions, which he completed in 646 and which still stands today as a compelling, first-person account of the life, cultures, and governments of the various towns and regions of Central Asia during the Tang dynasty.
The Emperor Taizong grew close to Xuanzang, and the monk served as his spiritual guide near the end of his life. His son and successor, Emperor Gaozong, built Xuanzang an Indian-style, five-story pagoda to house the scriptures and sculptures the monk brought back with him from India. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda, as it is called, still stands in modern Xi’an. It is a testament to Xuanzang’s contribution to the dissemination and institutionalization of Buddhism within China. It is also a powerful marker of the history of foreign travel and the long legacy of cultural and artistic exchange. Xuanzang’s sixteen-year, ten-thousand-mile journey along the Silk Road inspired—and continues to inspire—other travelers far west of China. Aurel Stein even wrote an account of the monk’s earlier journey.54
It was in great part because of Xuanzang’s report on his travels that Stein made his first expedition to Central Asia, which was reported on in the Times in 1901. On his way back to Central Asia, he stopped by Berlin and reported his findings to Albert Grünwedel, Director of the Indian Section of the Berlin Ethnological Museum. The following year, Grünwedel led the first German expedition to the area.55 He published his finds four years later, documenting the contents of forty-four crates of sculptures, manuscripts, and wall paintings removed from the ancient city of Khocho. The manuscripts were in Sanskrit, Uighur, Mongolian, Chinese, and Tibetan, betraying the international character of this borderland and crossroads region. The second German expedition was led by Grünwedel’s deputy, Albert von Le Coq.56 Le Coq arrived in Turpan in November 1904 and worked again in Khocho, where he found numerous manuscripts with texts in seventeen languages pertaining to Buddhism and other religions, including, especially, Manicheanism, of which he discovered illustrated pages that are the first pictorial records known of this religious community. In March 1905, Le Coq went to Bezelik. There he found the cave temples, long neglected, many of them filled with sand blown in from the deserts nearby. In addition, long, snowy winters filled the earth of the caves with moisture, damaging the surface of the wall paintings. Le Coq removed numerous mural paintings and other objects to Berlin. The expedition’s finds were published in 1912. There would be two more German expeditions in the area—Pelliot would be working there too, and then would follow Stein to Dunhuang and the Mogao caves—and Le Coq would publish a narrative account of the second and third expeditions in 1926. All of the German finds were removed to the Berlin Ethnology Museum. Those that survived the travails of World War II form the core of Berlin’s Museum of Indian Art in Dahlem and are installed in rooms devoted to the so-called “Turfan Collection.”57
What is one to make of this history of travel in the western reaches of China? Xuanzang’s travels were difficult. So too were those of Grünwedel, Le Coq, Stein, Pelliot, and Warner. All went in search of knowledge. And all removed local materials to faraway places for the benefit of others, who then and since have studied them and been inspired to search further for new knowledge about the people, cultures, and history of the western borderlands of China. Of course, now it is impossible to remove material from the region as the above-mentioned Europeans did; nor will India allow a pilgrim like Huanzang to remove items of significant cultural property to China (and of course China will not allow an Indian Buddhist pilgrim to remove such material to India). If today’s retentionist attitudes toward cultural property had been operative during the Tang dynasty, China’s culture would be all the poorer.
Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws like China’s, while said to be aimed at protecting archaeological sites and the scientific knowledge they contain (this is the archaeologists’ argument and the fig leaf worn by modern nations that impose such laws), are really intended to keep cultural heritage within the borders of the nation within which such property is found. They are national and nationalist laws. The Chinese request to the U.S. government for import restrictions on Chinese cultural property is clear about this. And it, like the cultural property laws that lie behind it—and all other nations’ cultural property laws—includes antiquities among cultural property and thereby nationalizes them. The Chinese government is in fact less concerned about the integrity of the archaeological sites within its modern borders than it is about holding onto cultural artifacts of all kinds—including antiquities—for itself and restricting the world’s access to them. Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws are not archaeological sites protection laws. They are retentionist cultural property laws, intent on keeping what they identify as national cultural property within the country for the nation, for the sake of affirming and strengthening claims on a national identity, on just what the nation is: a unique cultural entity identifiable by its forms and practices, coincident in reach with the extent of its current political borders, and that confirms a particular kind of identity on the people of the nation. It is, in China’s case, what defines China and its people against all non-Chinese or foreign others. It is part and parcel with China’s centuries-long preoccupation with cultural purity, what has for so long prevented it from accepting the idea that Chinese culture developed not just from the central region outward—from the Yellow River region during the Xia and Shang dynasties almost four thousand years ago—but simultaneously from multiple centers north and south. It is also part of what is driving the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project: an effort to lengthen China’s chronology and document its primacy among all distinguished world civilizations. Cultural purity, longevity, and primacy: the pillars of China’s sense of itself as a once-and-always great nation.
But Chinese culture—indeed, every nation’s culture—includes elements of foreign cultures with which its peoples have come into contact over many centuries. Buddhism was introduced into China during the Han dynasty in the first century A.D. It traveled along the trading routes from India through Central Asia into China, brought by foreign merchants and missionaries. Dunhuang is early and lasting evidence of the influence and presence of Buddhism in China. The earliest paintings in the shrines of the nearby Magao caves date from the fourth century A.D. They depict Buddhist nuns and monks and betray motifs and styles of Indian and Central Asian origin mixed with local Chinese stylistic effects and motifs. Earlier evidence of sculpted forms of the Buddha appear as early as the second century: one on a pedestal for a Sichuanese money tree, which would typically represent mountains with winged or horned animals climbing on them and often the Queen Mother of the West and her magical land, elements unrelated to and predating Buddhism in China. Later images of the Buddha in China betray a distinctly Ghandaran (modern-day Afghanistan) stylistic influence, which itself was influenced by Hellenistic Greek art carried by Alexander the Great and his troops hundreds of years earlier.
Centuries later, along the same trade routes, Islam would come to China from the West and eventually become part of the rich diversity of “Chinese” culture. Xuanzang’s Chang’an was a multicultural city with ninety-one Buddhist monasteries, two Nestorian Christian churches, and four Zoroastrian shrines. Emissaries from many foreign nations resided there; from India, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Distant customs, foods, social practices, beliefs, costumes, and art mingled with local ones, making the Chinese capital one of the most international cities on earth at the time. This would be equally true of Beijing under the Yuan dynasty four centuries later and subsequently under the Ming and the Ch’ing dynasties. China has for most of its history been engaged with the larger world and has borne the cultural imprint of these encounters. Communism itself of course came to China from the West. There is little today that one could say was “Chinese,” if by that one means bearing no influences from other cultures. Shanghai, its merchants, industrialists, financiers, professionals, and artists—all engaged with foreign colleagues and practices—is a truly international city competing on a global scale. Beijing is hosting the 2008 Olympic Games and much of its newest architecture and largest architectural commissions are the work of European and North American architects. China is as international now as it has been at any time in its glorious history.58
Nationalist retentionist cultural property laws are contrary to the generative principles of artistic, commercial, and social development. The latter depend on exchange and encounters with new and distant phenomena. The former seek to define and preserve a particular vision of the past as evident in a fixed, closed set of cultural norms to serve as the foundation for a present national identity determined by the nation’s dominant, elite cultural and political groups. China’s efforts in this respect are not new. The historian Owen Lattimore has written of China’s long-time preoccupation with its frontiers, the site of its engagement with foreignness. It built walls and guardposts and stationed armies all along its borders. It conjured images of foreigners as different and inferior. And yet it could never keep foreigners and foreign influences out of China. No country can. But still, China—like all countries—tries, if only figuratively; that is, if only by defining what is and what is not Chinese. And they always fail in the end. “China could never put an end to the ebb and flow of frontier history and maintain the civilization of China in the closed world that was its ideal.”59
History and identity matter greatly to the Chinese. The People’s Republic of China’s efforts to restrict access to the artifacts of its historical culture (by imposing strict export laws) are aimed at correcting the past and propping up the illusion of a “closed world.” It feels aggrieved by assaults on its historical culture by Europeans during the nineteenth century, its own political and social disorders in the early years of the twentieth century, the flight of the Nationalist government with much of the Imperial collection to Taiwan, the rampant violence and destruction of the Cultural Revolution during the late 1960s, and aggressive collecting of Chinese art by Western and Japanese institutions and individuals throughout all of these years. It wants to keep what it considers to be Chinese art within China. As the spokesman from the Poly Museum said: “Our national treasures should not be flowing beyond our borders. They are ours, part of our roots.”
But how deep and wide do these roots go? Do they extend equally to all populations and all cultures of modern China, including the fifty-six ethnic minority cultures? Are their cultures Chinese too? Are their antiquities preserved equally as Han Chinese antiquities? Are their archaeological sites identified, excavated, researched, and published equally as those valued by the dominant and elite Han Chinese bureaucratic authorities? In the end, the state determines what is and what is not valued as national culture. Decisions are made in Beijing, and Beijing is a long way from Dunhuang and the Magao caves. When considering the paintings on the walls of the frescoed cave temples at Magao, one is aware more of India and ancient Sogdiana than of Beijing. In both the far west and the far east of China today, one is surrounded by cultural objects. But are they equally Chinese? That is the question. We should be suspicious of easy answers to this question. After all, it all depends on what you mean by Chinese. And any simple answer only cheapens our understanding of China and Chinese culture, and of course of culture itself and the way it has always worked, free of political boundaries, to give form to humanity’s greatest hopes and aspirations.60